


Damages

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2013-02-01
Packaged: 2017-11-21 22:26:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a (probably) ongoing series of short fics exploring the relationship between Nyreen and Aria.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Trophy

The krogan had an imperfect word for it, the thing you keep for keeping’s sake, and the longer she spent down in Patriarch’s room the more Nyreen was convinced she’d had it wrong from the beginning.  The difference between a trophy and a memento always came down to where they were kept.

“Being a trophy isn’t so bad,” he’d said, rolling his shoulders and squinting up into the red wash of Afterlife’s ambience.  “But I guess you can find honor in a varren’s ass, too, if you looked at it in the right light.”

Trophies didn’t share secrets with a queen, though.  They didn’t drink too much brandy and dance, head and shoulders above the undulating asari. They didn’t argue between kisses and shoot between lies. And trophies didn’t get to know the shape of a second chance, how it curved into the deepest glimmer of purple.

It ate her up, the idea of it.  If she wasn’t a token, though …then what?

Live long enough with a memento and a person starts to wonder why they’re still touching that old thing, rubbing off the shine and replacing it with new grime every day, they begin to see how their keepsake keeps them instead.

Nyreen never tired of watching how Aria’s lips plumped and pulled around Omega’s name, it just took her too long to realize how different they seemed while saying hers. Too long with her knees up around her mandibles, not hearing what she needed, even if she was feeling worshipped. Something kept as close as a tattoo, a cut and color just as deep …for all her years, Aria never did it right, or right out in the open.

There came a moment, sometime after she stopped going down to see Patriarch, when Nyreen decided she could stand beside a goddess and count herself a first-rate trinket, or she could break the poisonous habit of forgetting what she was worth all on her own.

_We both knew the score.  If the rules don’t suit you, find another rock to live under._

Rigid and charred though it might be, there was a heart in all that blue flame, and odds were good that Nyreen’s ache was mirrored by something equally painful, if twisted, in Aria. That’s what happened when you broke the only rule that mattered.

When she walked away, she didn’t feel like an outcast.  More like a survivor.

Going dark on Omega was the hardest kind of living for a while, and she kept her doubts and principles in an uneasy jumble. Like trophies of a sort.  They forced her to live for herself, enduring and unblinking, and they helped her fight from the shadows she chose instead of the ones cast on her.


	2. Wages

_Spirits, Aria.  How did you know you could do that?_

_I didn’t._  
  
It takes everything she has, all of it funneling nuclear-hot through her arms down to the shield around Aria.  Protection forever her job, even if it was never official on one side of the bubble or the other.  The sphere is flawless, heavy with Nyreen’s reserves, but it’s a tenth of what Aria’s pouring into the barrier, gloves flaring and melting at the tips, and Nyreen can’t do what  _she_  does but envy’s the last thing on her mind.  
  
It’s fear that pulls trigger on each mech closing in, fear that whispers how her ‘impossible’ is merely Aria’s ‘improbable’, and fear that’s kept her blood safely on the inside of her body, for the most part. since the day she stepped foot on this rock.   
  
As Shepard bolts away from the reactor, the fissure in the barrier closes, and Nyreen is left with Aria’s trembling grip on her wrist.  For the second time in too many years to count, an asari blip, really, Nyreen pulls her to her feet.

  
.

  
The mirror’s been shattered for an hour and neither of them pick up the pieces.    
  
They just work around it, arguing like it’s the same as the meal they never got to.  Eating each other up, instead.  It’s easier to stare at the cracks, her bare chest in the spiderweb of glass, and wonder if they’d been there all along and were only now big enough to see.  Nyreen puts the tip of a talon into the largest gap, pulling another piece down.  
  
“If I take a squad you’ll be on your own.”  
  
In what’s left of the mirror she can see the deepening indigo under her own eyes, reflected along with the curve of Aria’s neck, on the settee somewhere behind her.  It’s a wearying shade, the cold truth of how a color can mean opposing things when it runs under such different skin.  
  
“Babe, I’ve been on my own longer than you’ve been alive,” says Aria, stretching.  
  
Nyreen hates the steam, all the stifling luxury of Aria’s public pomp boiled into a cloud of nothing. It makes her plates itch.  Mostly, though, she’s afraid of being unnecessary.  
  
“I can’t risk it, not-”  
  
“Talk about what you can do, whether or not you believe it,” Aria says, “and one day maybe you’ll actually  _do_  those things.”  
  
Nyreen puts the mirror to her back, puts the tiny, glittering pieces under the shadow of her heel, and crosses the room to pull Aria to her feet.  
  
“I can shoot a flea off an elcor’s back,” she says, keeping Aria’s arms loose in her fingers. “I can melt a merc’s hands to his own gun, and I can infiltrate a Battlemaster’s lair with only a pistol and an omni-tool.”   
  
“You’re not impressing some maiden on her first raid, Nyreen,” Aria replies, chin tilting, lips full of barbs just waiting for an opening. The kind of offense that’s weakest.  Still, it’s Aria’s close-combat specialty, and it’s hardly rusty.  “Is that all you can you do?”  
  
Nyreen slides her palms over familiar muscles, across the spray of violet freckles spanning Aria’s collarbone, and cups the back of her head.  She lets her finger, pad to talon, rub the ridge there, and she waits to part the heavy, folded tentacles until Aria’s breath goes shallow.  She smells like soap and the kind of biotic snap that never really leaves the skin, and Nyreen leans close enough to feel like that scent is inside her, chest to chest, with Aria fixated. She keeps her hand there, firm, finger making a slow arc, and whispers into Aria’s ear.  
  
“I can leave.”  
  
The wages of fear, she thinks, are always the hardest won. Nyreen wouldn’t trade hers for a whole turian fleet at her command.  She just wants this.  
  
The truth is that she doesn’t know until it’s something she’s already done.  The faded taste of azure between tongue and teeth, five fingers fitting over three and pressed into the mattress until the sun cuts through the shades in the morning.  Had she known it was possible until it was?  
  
She’s halfway to the door, yanking on her tunic, when Aria stops her.  
  
“Don’t.”


	3. Blunt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> turian nail-care. who knew?

The room she gets to herself, months into this unexpected…service…isn’t luxurious, but it’s more than Nyreen truly needs, and it’s close to Aria’s penthouse fortress.  There’s even a view of Omega’s perpetual, crimson districts below.  Raking her talons across the glass, she considers the window a strategic weakness but there’s a hum just beyond it that stops her.  Kinetic barrier.  Not strictly standard issue in this part of town, or anywhere Aria’s influence didn’t reach down with a kind eye.  Nyreen looks at the back of her hand, and the arc of talons silhouetted over the busy red city beyond.  
  
 _Don’t they have a say in how they live? Or die?_  
 _I **am**  their voice, the only one they’ll ever need._  
  
She spends less than an hour unpacking her foot locker and re-positioning the meager furniture in the room.  The bed gets turned three times before she gives up, pacing at its foot, unable to decide if she’s doing it as a defense to intruders, or just trying to gauge where someone else might appreciate it best; it’s a security measure in any event.  That she allows herself a ‘someone else’ to consider makes Nyreen’s mandibles flare.  It’s a conclusion she can feel, and yet not.    
  
A command of her own and she’s still a wriggling kid under her harder plates.    
  
Nyreen flips open a small case, and sits on the end of the bed, looking up when the window barrier ripples as a skycar passes too close. Whatever she is, whatever she’s coming to want here, right now she’s no different from most of Aria’s secrets.  Guarded.    
  
The light dremel had been a gift from her mother, from a time when she’d been too young to know how the sight of it would change her.  Because her mother went, and life clicked shut behind a handful of doors, and Nyreen’s talons still grew and snagged.  The tool employed miniscule mass effect fields specifically designed to hone turian claws, whisking the particulate dust into puffs of blue.    
  
It’s still a good model, heavy in her hands, and Nyreen’s talons are overdue.  
  
The tinny whir of the dremel barely registers in the apartment.  For a while, she’s alone with the receding shape of each talon, foggy seafoam light eating away the long growth but never dulling it.  Absorbed in the closeness of it, this personal ritual, Nyreen doesn’t hear the door chime.  She carves down her final talon, dremel awkward in her left hand, mind tumbling down to the details, caught up with the child she’d been when no one was around to do this for her.  No one in a series of barracks and cargo holds to remind her that the ash-burn scent of her own talon dust would be a comfort.  
  
The door chimes again, the lock apparently useless, and Nyreen jumps a little in her skin, blinking, as Aria ambles with a smile over the threshold and walks across the carpet stains.  Nyreen’s new old carpet stains.  
  
“What’s so funny?” she asks.  
  
“Flin’s idea of Afterlife’s entertainment lineup,” Aria replies, painted lip quirking. “Ever seen a hanar juggling act?”  
  
“I can’t say that I have.” Nyreen looks around for something to offer.  But’s all Aria’s stuff in one way or another, and she’ll know as well as Nyreen does that there’s no bottle of imported water here. Spirits, there was only one chair.  
  
“Then you’re in for a real treat,” she says, not looking anywhere but at Nyreen’s hands, at the dremel clasped loosely there.  “Did I interrupt something?”  
  
“I was- No, just settling in.”  
  
Aria slides the foot-locker directly in front of Nyreen and sits, the slim arc of color over one eye sweeping high for a moment. “Don’t let me stop you.”  
  
They stare at each other across the small bit of stale apartment air between them.  It still smells faintly of talon dust.  Maybe it’s a credit to the directness she’d inherited, her mother’s match of genes and will, that Nyreen doesn’t know how to look away.  So, she reaches down into Aria’s predatory silence, reaches down to unlatch the hasps of each boot, and decides to complete her evening’s ritual.  Her heavy weave socks come off inside out with a yank. Sharing has never come easy.  Nyreen gets the impression Aria doesn’t know any differently.  
  
She’s about to scoot back on the bed, switching the light dremel back on, when Aria pats her own knee.  
  
“Come on,” she says, and trails her fingers down Nyreen’s leg spur, guiding her foot to rest on the curve of one knee.  “Mind if I give it a try?”  
  
The dremel fits pretty well, even in her smaller hand, and Aria runs the tool lightly around Nyreen’s first toe, quick as a sketch artist.  From this strange angle, Nyreen watches the heady mix of concentration and care on Aria’s face, her features open, and there’s a ghostly sense of what came before.    
  
Had she seemed this way when she was alone, filing her own talons? Lost in thought as much as shadow.  
  
Puffs of disintegrating dust evaporate around her knuckles as she works, and Aria’s nose wrinkles.  But it’s good.  It’s the odd fit of a knee under the arch of her foot, vibrations tickling her nerves, but it’s good like Nyreen hasn’t felt since…feeling good was still an option.  
  
When she moves to the other foot, Aria winks at her, and the dremel goes back to crafting an elegant curve to her wild talons.  Distantly, behind an unopened place in her mind, Nyreen contemplates where Aria might have picked up this talent, the shaping too exact to be accidental.  
  
“Mmm.  You’re pretty good at this,” says Nyreen, acknowledging the slackness in her calves; the tissue-deep pull of relaxation as unfamiliar as water in the lungs.  Aria opens her mouth to speak, but Nyreen gallops ahead with a playful push on Aria’s knee, mandibles jutting for a second. “I know, I know.  You’re good at everything.”


End file.
